Top 325 Casting Quotes

One day, I went to meet a film producer and entered the wrong flat. It was a casting agency, and they suggested that I audition for a four-hero Telugu film. I was confirmed a month later. Interestingly, it’s not easy down South for a newcomer to bag positive roles, but I was adamant.

Make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You push for colour-blind casting; you draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are, not what colour your parents happen to be.

There are casting directors with lots of imagination, but also some with not as much imagination.

I’ve been lucky enough to do a few editorials in the U.K., but I’ve never even been on a casting for mainstream commercial work. When I try to understand it, I think people are scared to try something new.

People obsess about casting and representation, but really, all the real work is behind the camera. Casting an Asian American into a bad role where they’re shoehorned into these stereotypes is worse than not having cast them at all.

Superstitions actually played a big role in my life. I wouldn’t even go on a casting call if I had a hunch that it was an ‘unlucky’ day.

I’m an artist with a message, and my message is more for society, casting the mirror onto them and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we look like, what are we going to do about it, how are we going to use what we’ve been through to aid where we’re going.’

Casting directors don’t necessarily want a more recognizable commercial face. Sometimes, they want a lesser known person.

Don’t try to guess what a casting director wants.

We have a particular philosophy in the casting room that we don’t really tell the actors – the actors tell us.

Necessarily, I’m always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations… can never effect a reform.

Character is plot, and casting is character.

Simultaneously, the movie business now experiments with a colorblind approach to casting.

You think when you start getting jobs that it’ll get easier, but that’s the biggest lie ever. It gets harder. You have to put in more work. I wish it were the casting couch days because it’d be a lot easier!

‘Skins’ wanted to create a new thing by actually casting real teenagers. I think it was very brave of them. They also wanted to give the opportunity to people who didn’t go to drama school.

I always quite like the idea of casting against type when I’m looking for and trying to understand who a character is.

There were lots of perceptions about me, right from being gay to casting couch to being a drunkard to getting violent, none of what I am in real life.

I’ve never encountered homophobia in casting from the studios or networks – not once, not ever. Where you encounter it is with the agents and the managers, they’re the ones who have an outdated notion of the price an actor might pay if it’s discovered that they’re LGBTQ.

I can honestly, and proudly, say that I never was on the casting couch. Oh, of course there have been advances from certain men in the movie industry, but nothing overwhelming.

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you’re saying you have a political conscience but you don’t agree with any of the existing parties.

We’re finding that the casting of ‘A Few Good Men’ is different from the musicals because the kind of actors that you need to do it are movie actors, basically.

For us, the biggest thing is casting and making sure that every role has the right fit and that person understands the role, and then, really, it’s pretty easy. You just try to stay out of the way and say ‘action’ and ‘cut’ – don’t say ‘cut’ too soon. Let it happen.

My goal was always to get better roles, and in my case, performing on stage really led to great opportunities. My breakthrough came when I did Calder Willingham’s ‘End as a Man’ on stage and was spotted by Max Arnow, who’d been the casting chief for Columbia.

After ‘Homeland,’ I was offered a lot of very authoritarian, square, angry boss types, but I wanted to do something different. Casting directors are surprised when they look at my CV and see all the work I’ve done, from Shakespeare to playing Nelson Mandela.

The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work.

I just like to catch fish, I don’t care if it weighs half a pound or 10 pounds. But I can’t do a lot of casting. I can work a jig or a worm. But not for long, especially if the big ones are biting. Those big bass will make it hurt after a while.

Casting directors now just see me as the hard-core sniper or prison guard.

I am much more involved in the filmmaking experience on Mag Seven. I’m much more involved in story elements, casting decisions, the writing of the show, the blocking of the scenes.

Casting directors I don’t think are the best in Mexico at street casting. Whereas, I think, in New York and in L.A., that’s more common; not so in Mexico. So it’s up to you as a director in a lot of ways to go out and do that.

If you’re going to go to an audition, you don’t want to go in trying to force yourself into some archetype that has been thought up by a director and translated by a casting director.

I suppose that there might have been leading men who were put off from casting me as the ingenue because I was taller than they were, but I’ve no idea that this ever happened. When I did ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ opposite Mark Rylance in the West End, we used the difference in our heights as part of their relationship.

Maybe I’m too masculine. Casting directors cast in their own, or an idealized image. Maybe I don’t look like anybody’s ideal.

L.A.’s become so cosmopolitan in its casting and also in its world view.

In the beginning of our career, we want to make an identity, and I am happy that people think I have good comic timing, and they are casting me in films.

I don’t know what I’m qualified to do, film-wise… So it’s really down to a director or a casting director to find something that they think I could do.

No, I don’t think it is required for casting directors to be actors too. My mentor Gautam Kishanchandani cannot act to save his life!

Casting couch is not just a man’s fault. It is important to say this because we blame the other side always.

The casting of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ is a dream. Anil Kapoor, as the sleazy TV host, diamonds winking in his earlobes, has never been better; the quietly understated Irrfan Khan turns in another bravura performance as the police inspector whose questioning brings out Jamal’s story.

Every casting director I’ve met is a woman.

Referring to the PAP as uncaring so as to persuade some of our fellow Singaporeans to consider casting their vote for the WP will be self-defeating for us.

For the Amex, which has been casting around for a role for itself, microcaps fill a crucial void – a ‘niche’ that Amex officials feel has been neglected.

At drama school, a casting director asked the class to walk round the room one at a time, and we had to imagine who they might be. The two before me were described as a doctor and a businessman, but when it came to me, they said homeless person. That was when I thought I’d better do something about my appearance!

We need to get rid of bullying. We need to get rid of abuse. We need to get rid of harassment. We need to get rid of the casting couch. Instead, we need to build the bench.

It’s writing songs within the structure of telling a story, so it becomes a platform for diverse songwriting, for a writing process that’s broader than just figuring out a song. You’re also dealing with always pushing the story forward, with casting the voices, with the orchestration, with the arrangements.

I tried out for another show while I was in college so I could pay off my student loans, and it sort of led to The Real World. The same people that were casting that show were casting The Real World, so they asked me to do it.

I would love to do parts I have never done before, but unfortunately, if you have had success in a particular type of character, the casting agents think, ‘Oh! We’ll have something exactly like that.’ It’s very boring.

I can do comedy, so people want me to do that, but the other side of comedy is depression. Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don’t realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.

I realized it wasn’t necessary to work in the traditional methods of carving and casting.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and then I got this call from a casting director in Los Angeles. She remembered me from something years before, and she called my mom wanting me to audition for this thing.

I think Michael Crawford realised, I think we all realised, once we’d gone the route of casting a very young girl, you can’t really cast a 65 year old man opposite. Slightly different resonance I think. No, we weren’t going to go there. We’d have Jack Nicholson in the lead.